I lived in a perfect OOP bubble for my entire life. Everything was peaceful and it worked perfectly. When I wanted to move that player, I do player.move(10.0, 0.0); When I want to collect a coin, I go GameMan -> collect_coin(); And when I really need a global method, so be it. I love my C++, I love my python and yes, I also love my GDScript (Godot Game Engine). They all work with classes and objects and it all works perfectly for me.
But oh no! I wanted to learn Rust recently and I really liked how values are non-mutable by defualt and such, but it doesn’t have classes!? What’s going on? How do you even move a player? Do you just HAVE to have a global method for everything? like move_player(); rotate_player(); player_collect_coin(); But no! Even worse! How do you even know which player is meant? Do you just HAVE to pass the player (which is a struct probably) like this? move(player); rotate(player); collect_coin(player, coin); I do not want to live in a world where everything has to be global! I want my data to be organized and to be able to call my methods WHERE I need them, not where they just lie there, waiting to be used in the global scope.
So please, dear C, Rust and… other non OOP language users! Tell me, what makes you stay with these languages? And what is that coding style even called? Is that the “pure functional style” I heard about some time?
Also what text editor do you use (non judgemental)? Vim user here
I still use C for embedded device programming and it’s really just about splitting code into separate files by what they do if an app ever gets too big.
If you really need something OOP’ish, you can use function pointers inside of a struct. You would be lacking the OOP syntax of C++, but it’s fundamentally similar.
When you are counting bytes for firmware, it’s helpful to have a language like C. In theory, it limits code complexity and is much easier to estimate what is going to be shat out of the compiler. Honestly, byte counting is super rare for me since there is just so much program space on devices these days. (If I did any work with ATTiny MCUs, I would probably coding in .ASM anyway…)
While I don’t code in Rust (yet), I still think it makes perfect sense not to leverage classes. My limited experience in *lang languages taught me that simple functions are perfect for heavy parallelization. By restricting the number of pointers you are tossing around and using only immutable values, the surface area for failure is drastically reduced. (This is also awesome for memory safety as well.)
Just remember that all languages are tools and you should use the tools that fit the job. Efficiency should always be top of mind and not the nuances of a language. (I grew up learning how to conserve CPU ticks, so that should explain my point of view.)